Volvo 850 CV Joint info

northernlights »

I have had a torn drivers side outer CV boot on my 94 850 Turbo for longer than I care to admit. Because it wasn’t making noise, I was originally planning on cleaning, regreasing and rebooting the axle, but as I investigated replacement parts there seemed to be confounding information on the CV axles.

Looking at interchange or aftermarket information didn’t really help, because it seemed like within reason, i.e. any car with a 4spd auto, everything physically interchanged. But, I found different part numbers for outer boots based on turbo/non turbo, but no easy way of identifying what I had, or what I needed.

While the aftermarket support is pretty good for these cars, as can be seen from the no-core prices for complete CV axles, I wanted to stick with OEM if possible for quality reasons. The boots in particular seem to be a problem in that often the aftermarket stuff doesn’t last. This meant I needed to find out what was really out there, and compare parts to find out what I could use. It turned into a bigger project than I expected as I tried to determine what these cars were originally supplied with.

So with this in mind, I dug around a bit, and scored some used and new CV parts, and here is what I found, or (disclaimer warning!) at least is my best guess.

Note this only applies to the FWD 4 spd auto for the 850, and probably the S70/V70/C70 with production dates as late as 12/98. I have no idea what is going on with the manual transmissions and AWD stuff other than the fact that they are different!

MVS Contributor Northernlights takes our understanding of 850 (and P80) axles and multiplies it by 100.